Doing a design study

What to include 👉

1. Before the situation

2. The setting

3. Objects with affordances, constraints, enabling constraints

4. Events and impacts, flows

5. Closing

6. Impacts beyond the situation

Methods

Empathy maps

Journey maps (moments that matter)

Service blueprint

Charts

Storyboard

Photographs

Audio

Video

Screen recording

Describes, analyses, evaluates a situation, and (sometimes but not always) creatively responds by formulating design challenges and designing/redesigning in response to those challenges

A design study is often best done in a related set of studies, building a rich picture of a context, so that we can understand how specific details in a situation are shaped by other situations and the interconnections between them (the systems perspective)

Practitioners do this all the time, but often tacitly, and often in conversation. To get good at it fast, we need to do it more explicitly and more visibly. That is also good, inclusive, project practice, making it easier for a wider range of people to participate in a project.

We need to capture and understand the diversity and shared characteristics of the people involved in situations, including those who determine or influence their creation and what happens in them (people who have more or less consciously designed the situation) Read more 👉

We call this inter-related set of studies the rich picture - it best built up over a longer period of time, and needs to be documented in an accessible, usable, and updatable way so a range of further studies and design challenges can be developed within it

A description of the details of a situation (designed, non-designed, or emergent), the people in the situation, the non-human actors (animals, living systems, machine intelligences), their experiences, intentions, thoughts, actions, interactions, effects, transformations

This can be incredibly complex, so we don't try to give an exhaustive description, we look for the "salient details" - those that contribute to our goals in doing the design study

Design theorists have developed models that guide us in looking for and documenting how situations work. Read more 👉

But we have to be careful that we don't overlook details that don't fit with our expectations, that we aren't deceived and limited by our own assumptions and biases (an awareness of cognitive and cultural bias is essential)

A good way to focus our descriptive work is to look for "moments that matter" (from Dan and Chip Heath's book) to the people in the study, then analyse why those moments matter, the characteristics that make them matter, how those moments happened, were made possible, are made possible for others, work for some people but not others - we call this analysis.

Often when analysing the details of a situation we need to build a richer picture, this can lead us back to the situation for more description, or to other related situations - we do this iteratively

As we develop our understanding of the situation and related situations we will want to make value judgements about what we find, we evaluate - are things right? for example, are there inequalities being produced and reproduced, is the environment being damaged?

Our evaluations can lead us to formulating design challenges that we think need to be addressed through change by design - often expressed as "how might we?" questions

In response to these challenges we might need to look in more depth at the situations we have studied, or look at them from different perspectives, or look at other related situations to build a sufficiently rich picture

We may want to look at related situations from an a systems perspective, considering how situations are connected by resources flows (including information, considered as a resource), and the protocols, gates, algorithms, channels etc. that control the flow of resources - cultural enablements and constraints are a key aspect of this

A frame that we put around part of the world so that we can start with a focus for describing a related set of events and features as experienced and acted by one or more people in the situation

The frame may only be temporary. As we explore the situation we might want to extend to what happens before or after, or what happens in connected spaces, or what happens in a wider system in which the situation happens. We have to use our judgement to decide where to look next to enrich our understanding to serve our goals.

We want to see things from the different perspectives of the people in the situation

But not just the human perspective

A fully ecological approach considers the situation from the perspectives of other living things and non-living structures in the situation - for example, considering how human behaviour may degrade resources

We also need to consider how what happens in the situation impacts beyond the situation, for example in creating pollution

The "situation" we choose to study depends on what we want to achieve (see the link for more on this).

For example "Jenny having breakfast in Jim's Cafe on a typical Monday morning" - open up to find out more about this framing, and how we chose it. Read more 👉

Improve some aspect of the world - the primary motivation to do design studies. Types of situation 👉

Specific situation

Related situations

Situations for a specific person

Situations for a group of people

Develop our design capabilities and those of the communities we work with

Develop relationships, develop community

Produce academic knowledge about some aspect of the world

Showcase good design

Highlight bad design

Can sometimes generate immediate solutions to tame problems

Often lead to half-formed ideas that are quickly forgotten

The desire to solve quickly leads us to overlook systems-level issues

Less chance of building a body of knowledge and community-level support for substantial sustained change

Can reinforce inequalities and biases

Can make things worse

Sometimes used to make people feel like they are making a difference, when in reality they will be ignored

If well coordinated we can get many contributions from a network of many different people

Richer range of perspectives

Able to pick up on otherwise hidden details and differences

Good for promoting diversity

Builds a long-term platform for continuous improvement

Allows us to see and change system-level factors

Good for building confidence and capability - individuals and groups can build-up their contributions progressively over time, and see the rich picture building

Good for building stronger arguments for change

Good for building community coalitions for change

REQUIRES GREATER LEVEL OF COORDINATION AND COLLABORATION, AND USE OF TOOLS FOR RECORDING THE BIG PICTURE, MANAGING ACTIVITIES, AND BRINGING DIVERSE PEOPLE TOGETHER, PERHAPS REMOTELY, OVER TIME